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eldavojohn writes "One thing Diablo 3 has that many other games do not is a 'Real Money Auction House' (RMAH), which went live today for players with two factor authentication. Of course, mere hours before that, Blizzard publicly announced they would follow through on their promises. Accounts they have identified as cheaters and botters have been banned 'by the thousands.' No official number is out, but the news is indicating that as people get off of work and return home to their bot-wives and bot-kids they may find themselves without a valid Battle.net account (possibly tied to other games like SCII and WoW). Blizzard has also included many fixes to remove/dissuade many other exploits but if their past arcane attitude toward the 'gamers of the game' is any indication, thousands will be unhappy."

D3 doesn't really have a single player mode. You're always connected to their servers, are taking up a game slot (or have to wait for one!), have to deal with server lag, have no choice about what patch to play, etc. You basically have a muliplayer mode that you choose to play alone.

Playing on a public server in D2 was downright treacherous. You could enter the game only to be instantly killed by some cheater. I'm glad they have the ban hammer. Also, there's not many times when i'm playing D3 and my computer is not connected to the internet given that I don't often shut off my home router nor does my internet connection go down.

Internet is becoming a new "always on" utility, just like power, water and phone.

If you had a clue on how games are designed I wouldnt have to explain to you how stupid you sound. Games arent jsut designed form the aether, DECISIONS are made that affect the balance of the game. Those DECISIONS included hampering single player mode so severely that the only truly viable option is to trade. Single player mode was PURPOSEFULLY deprecated to force trades. It was a decision wholly dictated by business reasons, not gameplay.

In the Reddit AMAA the designers explicitly state that they did not design the game around auction house use. During their internal testing they did not have a big enough group to even test a design that revolved around auction house usage. Of course they may be lying, but I doubt it.

That "bug" was just a rumor started by some streamers and people who photoshopped images of them having a ton of gold. They were trying to get people afraid of using the auction house so they could get some low bids on items that would expire during Tuesday's downtime. It was a scam. Yes you can cancel your auction when you shouldn't be able to (because they stupidly made the check for when it could be canceled client side only), but upon canceling the auction the bidders always get their gold back and the person canceling the auction just gets the item, no gold. You know, exactly how one would expect it to work.

There is a petition over at change.org [change.org] asking Blizzard to release an offline mode path. It would be nice if we could reach the 100'000 signatures necessary

Everything from dungeon layout to boss mechanics to loot drops is done on the server. There is no simple "offline patch" that would let you play without an internet connection. They'd basically be rewriting the game from scratch if they did that (which they won't)

As someone who until recently worked in Blizzard customer support, I can tell you there is absolutely no chance that your account details were leaked from within the company.

Gold sellers are in the business of selling gold for real money, they have a vested interest in compromising accounts in any way they possibly can. Most commonly, people are the victims of phishing scams, but gold sellers try exploit every weakness they can, including: use of malware, zero day software vulnerabilities, trying email passwords they got from hacked websites and forums, use of common passwords between, account sharing, etc. They are *very* determined since they get a paycheck from it at the end of the day.

At this point you are no doubt already thinking of your response in which you will endeavour to explain that it's impossible *you* were compromised in some way and that it *must* be through a fault of Blizzard. I am sorry, but even though you may be too ashamed or proud to admit it, you need to swallow your pride and accept that your account was *in fact* compromised due to a failure on your part with account security and you should carefully evaluate your account security practices or you will be compromised again in a similar way in the future, if not in WoW, then for some other service.

If you choose to believe it couldn't have been your fault, then you are simply in denial and although it may make you may sleep better at night, you are still as insecure as when your account got compromised in the first place.

Blizzard also expends a significant amount of resources addressing compromised accounts and even worse, it's bad PR for them when people are victims, Blizzard has *every* interest in cutting down the number of compromised accounts. This is also demonstrated by them making the mobile authenticator a free download, or the physical token which is available for a nominal fee (less than $10 *including* shipping).

In regards to your account still having not been unbanned after 4 months, there are few explanations. They may have asked you to do a virus scan first and never heard back from you. Sometimes the account management page doesn't get updated until you try log into the game. Or, possibly, but sadly, the agent you dealt with slipped up, they're only human, but it's still exceedingly poor service if that is what happened.

Finally, in regards to your unsubscribed account having game time on it, gold sellers often use free game time promotions or fraudulent means to add game time to inactive accounts.

In the Reddit AMAA the designers explicitly state that they did not design the game around auction house use. During their internal testing they did not have a big enough group to even test a design that revolved around auction house usage. Of course they may be lying, but I doubt it.

This post [battle.net] from a Blizard employee seems to state that they did tweak the general loot drop rate in response to the auction house. It's nowhere near "revolving around the auction house" (and hence nowhere near the conspiracy you replied to), but it does seem like the auction house was accounted for in the expected gear progression.

Yes, it's a really bad thing when their servers are overloaded and you can't play, or their servers are down for maintenance and you can't play, or someone hacks your account and gets you banned and you can't play, or they patch your favorite ability out of the game and you can't decide to skip the patch until you're ready to change classes, or your internet is out for any reason and you can't play, or you go to a LAN party that can't afford a major outside connection and you can't play, or you try to play a Hardcore character and you disconnect or lag out at a bad moment and die and lose your character, or, or, or...

There's a lot of reasons why it is a bad thing. The most notable reason was the First Week Launch Experience. Most people wanted to play solo anyway, but couldn't even do that due to the inadequate server capacity. The only reason that caused any problems at all was because you couldn't play in an off-line mode.

If this were an actual MMO, where the entire design is around having lots of players together, that would all be par for the course. This is an explicitly limited multiplayer experience that has no real need for the server connection at all, except for the DRM properties such a connection enforces, and an attempt to prevent some player-base fragmentation that I'd wager is not really going to have any notable effect in any case (those that would have played in offline/local modes aren't going to participate much in the extra features afforded by the always-on connection even though they're forced to be on the server where they are an option).

Steam lets you play games offline. I played a lot of Torchlight on my netbook which, ironically, rarely had internet access. When I got home, it'd sync my save game with the Steam Cloud (el-oh-el), and I could pick up where I left off on my desktop.

That's why I have 132 Steam games, but will never buy another Blizzard product again.

In the initial beta runs, they apparently shipped the server and client bundled together to run on the local machine, presumably because the server code was under development and in a constant state of flux. They stripped it back out fairly early on. But there's certainly no technical reason why someone with the sourcecode couldn't merge them together fairly easily.

What do you mean? The team that developed Torchlight and which is about to release Torchlight 2 consists of several of the lead designers and artists for Diablo and Diablo2. The Torchlight series is marked by its quality, its innovations (such as adding pets who can run back to town to sell stuff for you), and its $20 price tag, which I find very telling. So I ask, where is the joke?